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Sunday, 12 February 2012

What to do with snow pictures

If you live in a place that has lots of snow or if you have an opportunity to take pictures in the snow, jump at the chance!

You might think - well, yes, snow pictures are pretty but everybody takes them and in the end they all look the same. NOT so, if you have Photoshop Elements. Photographs which are taken with a lot of contrast often come out the best and photos with snow mean lots of contrast and the potential for silhouettes.

I went walking with a friend on Friday morning straight after it had snowed because where I live in the South of England, snow can disappear very quickly the same day. I took some quite simple shots with a point-and-click camera and now I feel I have the potential for some great photo manipulation.

I have been messing around with brushes and trying 'journal' type backgrounds so I literally sloshed colour onto several layers and came up with this (I didn't even like it to be honest):

At this point I thought what can I do with it? And then I thought of my snow pictures and dug out a picture. It was a little blackbird on a fence and with my x10 zoom I managed to get a reasonable shot even though I would have liked to be a bit closer:

I put the picture above the coloured background as a layer and tried different blending modes. When I came to Exclusion I thought - that's it! I duplicated the layer and applied another blend and this is what I got:

I love this. This would be great to print onto cloth now, add a border and do some great free motion embroidery.